A ground-breaking civil rights conference, planned by and for young people in Yorkshire, went ahead despite claims that the local council placed difficulties in its path. On Tuesday 17 November, 450 young people packed into an international conference centre in Leeds to discuss the issues of most concern to them growing up in twenty-first century
Theme: Violence and harassment
Swiss poll crushes minarets
Graham Murray writes from Switzerland as the country votes to ban the building of minarets. I’m sitting in a café in Geneva at 8.30am on ‘the morning after’, which seems like an appropriate expression given yesterday’s events. While I write this, the radio news comes on and refers to ‘the shock’. Everyone took it for
IQ film misses opportunity
Channel 4’s Race and Intelligence: Science’s Last Taboo programme missed an opportunity to educate a new generation about the sham ‘scientific’ claims behind this controversy. Rageh Omaar opened his programme on the connections between race and intelligence, part of a five-part series, with the kind of doom-laden voice-over we’ve come to expect from his investigative
Calais migrants demand rights
We reproduce below a statement from a grassroots group carrying out practical solidarity work in Calais. As survival packs are distributed in Calais, migrants and solidarity groups call for human rights for all and an end to police repression. Today [10 November], packs including blankets, ponchos, tarpaulins and hygiene packs were distributed to more than
Company’s use of anti-terror laws criticised
The use of anti-terror legislation by an energy company to stop protests by a ‘blacklisted’ worker at one of its plants has been branded ‘fanciful’ by a High Court judge. Under the Terrorism Act, Scottish & Southern Energy brought an injunction against union member Steve Acheson to stop him protesting at the Fiddler’s Ferry power
The criminalisation of protest
Evidence is mounting that the authorities are criminalising more areas of peaceful protest. These protests are UK-wide and include anti-racists, anti-deportation activists and pro-Palestine campaigners. Protest against mass deportation to Nigeria An anti-deportation demonstrator involved in a blockade of Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre has been released from prison after serving eight days of a
Spooked: how not to prevent violent extremism
A report published today by the Institute of Race Relations finds that the government’s Prevent programme for tackling extremism fosters division, mistrust and alienation. Entitled Spooked: how not to prevent violent extremism, the report suggests that the Prevent programme has been used to establish one of the most elaborate systems of surveillance ever seen in
Misleading the immigration courts
A recent High Court judgment shows that Tamils have been unlawfully detained and possibly wrongly refused asylum because of Home Office non-disclosure of its own policies. A High Court judge recently held that a Tamil who has been held for deportation for over three years had been unlawfully detained, because the Home Office failed to
The removals lottery
Lawyers are considering ways of extending court rulings to all on mass expulsion charter flights. As reported on IRR News last week (‘Deportation flight goes ahead – without France’), a speedy and concerted campaign by over thirty migrant and human rights organisations led to the French immigration minister withdrawing from a joint Franco-British deportation charter
Subject to British values
New nationality legislation will create a class of subjects not citizens. The one thing which can be said for the empire was that anyone who was born anywhere in its far-flung corners was legally British by birth. True, various stratagems were employed to prevent these imperial subjects from settling in the mother country, but at